It was a dismal Monday morning and nothing had gone right so far. The weather had been rainy and it was a freezing rain. It hung on the trees and overhead wiring and froze there. It was uncomfortable to have to do outside work but never the less there were many who had to brave the discomfort and labor in these miserable rainy conditions.

     I had been sitting at the computer station trying to write a letter to my son who lives in “Sunny California”. I had completed a goodly portion of the letter when the electricity went off. And then came back on almost instantly. This was not uncommon because the idiot in the power transfer station had changed power grids and was slow in making the switch. This usually happens when an inexperienced person is to make the transfer. It is very frustrating when you are working on a computer and lose everything you have done. It causes a stream of invectives not suitable for public dissemination.

     Starting all over and trying to remember what I had previously done, I continued with my task. Again I had reached a point where I paused to concentrate on what more I was going to add when suddenly the electricity went off again. Darn!, Darn!, Darn! and more Darn! This time the power was off a wee bit longer, but came on again in a few minutes, and then immediately went off again and did not come back on. So there we were sitting in a darkened house with no lights no heat, all electrical appliances on the fritz. The quiet was deafening!!!!! Nothing to do but wait and while doing that, phoning the power company to report the outage. Little did we know this outage was going to last for almost week. Ruth suggested we go buy a portable generator to supply some electricity for the refrigerators and the heater. But me, the optimist said “Nah it will come back on shortly”.

     On about the second day the freezers began to show sings of warming up and I knew I had made a slight error in judgment, so we decided to go get a generator. Ruth called Home Depot, and Lowe’s to find out if any were in stock that we could buy. .Surprise!, Surprise!, Surprise! , we were told they were all sold out, but luckily Lowe’s said they had a shipment coming in a 1:00 P.M. in the afternoon. Consequently we visited their store at that time. We asked where we could find the generators and were told to go to the back of the store where a line was formed of people waiting to buy the generators. Believe me, that line was long. We went to the back of the line which(we found out later was 108 people long ) at that time and the line kept getting longer as we waited.

     Shortly after we got in line a store representative announced to the people in line that “The delivery truck is one half hour out and would be there shortly and that it had 208 generators on board. A policeman came around and it turned out he was a friend of the man in front of us and he went to the front of the line and counted those in front of us. That was when we found out we were number 108. We began to feel safer in that we would be getting one of those generators, but then the policeman told us that some of the people in line were buying more than one. Suddenly a cheer went up as the store rep. called out that the truck had arrived and they would be loading the customers carts immediately as the truck was being unloaded and the line began to move. It didn’t take long before we were at the front of the line and a generator was loaded on a shopping cart and we were on our way to the cash register. Then, to the parking lot we went. That was when I found that the box was too heavy for me to load onto the truck. As I was struggling with it, a man, seeing my futile efforts, came and helped me get it onto the truck. We drove home and the rain was continuing and was freezing as it fell, but the roads were not slippery at this time.

     When we got home and the truck was in the garage Ruth and I were trying to figure out how we were going to get that big box unloaded. I went to the basement and got a couple of 2 inch x 6 inch by 6 foot long foot boards and brought them up to the garage and made a ramp from the truck bed to the ground and we managed to let the box slide to the ground. Then I got my little hand truck and took the box into the garage where we could unpack it. Little did we know that we were going to have to assemble it, but we soon found that out.

     First out of the box was the wheels, then the axle, the bag of nuts bolts washers and axle clips and the instruction manual. By this time the afternoon was nearly fading in the evening hours. The instructions said to stand the generator up on end to install the axle, but the box said generator is filled with oil do not tip. I decided not to stand the generator on end, but to tilt it up far enough to get the axle and the wheels in place. I held the end up while Ruth slipped the axle in place and put the wheels onto the axle. Then ,we had to put the stationary leg under the other end of the frame. Again I held it up while Ruth placed the leg under it and slipped the bolt and nut on to it. Now we could roll it in place just outside the garage. It was when I discovered that I did not have enough gasoline to run it for a very long time so we had to go try to find a filling station that had electrical power to pump the gas to fill our cans.

     The power cords that came with the generator were long enough to reach through the window into the mud room and from there we had to run extension cords to the equipment that we needed to connect which was our refrigerators and the forced air heating unit. The two refrigerators were fairly easy, but the furnace was located in the basement at the other end of the house. This was going to need a cord over 90 feet long and had to be heavy duty type of cord. Luckily I had one which I had used when I was in the construction business, so I stretched it along side the house and into the mechanical room with the heater in it. At last we were ready to go, but it also was now very dark outside and flashlight were needed for everything we wanted to do. We were warned by the generator instructions not to start everything at once so one at a time we plugged in the equipment, waiting a few minutes each time we plugged in something additional.

     At last we had the “fridges” running and heat in the house. At 2:00A.M in the morning as I was sleeping in the recliner, the generator ran out of gasoline and it had to be filled and restarted and it was still freezing rain outside. The limbs of the trees were becoming overloaded with ice and were snapping with a loud bang that resembled a war going on outside. Never the less the job had to be done. When it was daylight and we looked around ,the devastation was readily apparent trees and limbs were laying all over and indeed it looked as if the whole area had been hit by a tornado.

     After about four days as I had just filled the gas tank on the generator again, the power came back on with much happiness, for us, but many people did not get their power back for a week later and some not even then.

     Now it is a couple of weeks later and the tree people are all busy cutting and hauling the brush away. Much of it forms a tall fence along the streets of the neighbor hood waiting to be taken to a place where it can be ground into mulch or disposed of in some other way.

     It was the worst storm and most destructive one that we have had in many years, but a few days later another storm was predicted that would dump about six inches of new snow on us. Fortunately that one veered off into another direction and we were spared another catastrophic episode.

     As you can well imagine we were happy and thankful that we did not have to endure that again so quickly.